On the Eleventh Day of Anime: Episodic Suffering (Blogging Sword Art Online)

This all started off as a silly little project on an internet forum. In a weird bout of self-loathing I asked to be recommended an anime I wouldn’t like, and Sword Art Online was one of the first ones that came up. And so, at the beginning of this year, I started watching that show. My obvious opinions on the show aside (you can’t get more obvious with the title), it was my first time actually documenting my impressions with each episode as I went through the first season. Additionally, the coming of the second season was my first actual attempt at episodically blogging a currently airing show. And at least for the first half of that, I was able to keep up a consistent flow of posts.

I had my doubts as to whether or not I could actually keep up a schedule as daunting and colossal as a single post per week. If you’re even remotely familiar with my updating habits, I’ve taken a lot of unwarranted and avoidable breaks from the blog due for up to months at a time due to sheer laziness. I could chalk it up to writer’s block, but at this point I know that it’s my inability to focus on this tab for the hour or so it takes to finish the post. If this is news to you, I’ve talked about this particular problem in my behavior with a previous post. Suffice to say, just one post a week has proved to be difficult enough for my concentration. And if it weren’t for my parents’ insufferable Christmas music blaring in the background I’d be done with this post at least a half hour earlier. I digress, however.

Much to my surprise, I was able to keep up weekly posts on SAO II for the first 13 episodes (despite a slight hiccup on the last one). Part of it is because I found the experience to be a lot of fun. I was able to entertain myself greatly with each post. Me not particularly liking Sword Art Online allowed me to be a bit more hyperbolic about my complaints towards the show, and sifting mindlessly through imgur for more reaction gifs has never served a greater purpose in my life than to accentuate the jokes I was going for with my posts. And this post series has by far been the most popular for my blog, as most currently airing episodic posts do for blogs, and the few times they showed up on Reddit has intrigued me greatly. Not that it changed anything, mind you, I’ve still got a long ways to go if I ever dream about getting more people to read my opinions on cartoons.

But enough about that. There’s a more important question to be asking about my Sword Art Online posts and it is thus: am I going to finish up SAO II in post form? Short answer, yes. As for why I ended up falling behind, it’s because, well, I’ve actually been stuck on episode 16 ever since college started back up. And with so many unexpectedly good premieres from this Fall season, I had to compromise to avoid getting crushed under the weight of my own workload. It’s a bit unfortunate that my episodic posts ended up falling to the wayside because of it. So for any of you who were actually looking forward to more timely posts, I’m sorry for not saying anything about it.

However, now that the festivities are mostly over and I’ve finished my Secret Santa reviews and 12 Days posts, I intend to finish this post series on my own time. At least with the threat of falling behind being a nonfactor I can take more time fleshing out my posts. Well, it’s as if they weren’t long enough already; most of them clock anywhere from 1.5k-2k words and that’s usually because I’m just belching out thoughts as they come. But they will come back starting in a few days, guaranteed.

Until then, enjoy your Christmas.

Addendum

No seriously, I have not been watching SAO II after episode 15 and am completely in the dark about what happens next aside from the few things I’ve seen on Twitter that only state the obvious about the quality of SAO II. This is going to be interesting.